The present invention relates to data processing and, more specifically, to online learning using information fusion for equipment predictive maintenance in railway operations.
The ability to make sense of large amounts of data, or “big data” as it is often referred to, is a challenging task. With the ever-increasing numbers of available data sources and rapid, ongoing enhancements made in the computing power of data generation devices, as well as the wide variety of types of data (e.g., both structured and unstructured) that can be collected today, managing big data can require advanced techniques and technologies. Clearly, the ability to analyze and interpret these large amounts of complex and variable data has the potential to be of great value to an entity or entities responsible for or having an interest in the data. For example, in many industries that monitor the health of equipment or other assets, accurate analyses of this data can be used to predict and, thus, take measures to prevent equipment or asset failures.